But it is a testament to Facebook's success that their many changes - and they change things a lot and often - have generally been readily accepted, if not without initial 'sound and fury'. And I like the fact that Facebook changes a lot. Indeed, I suspect Facebook would be much less successful without frequent change.
Why is lots of change so important?
I certainly enjoy sharing my friends and relatives lives and doings on Facebook; for me and almost everyone else this is, of course, Facebook's primary feature. But let's be honest, much of what we read about some of our friends and family is less than scintillating, so the sharing process itself has to be engaging. Facebook isn't successful simply because it allows us to connect with people we know who are otherwise too far away to see and hear from everyday; nor is it successful just because it is an application we all enjoy using - an enjoyment that is kept fresh by change. I think it is the combination of the connections and the process - in different proportions for different people - that explains Facebook's success.
It is as much the medium as the message that engages us. Another day, I might ponder on what I see as Facebook's biggest challenge for its future - how it maintains an engaging process in the face of plans to become a utility, at least as that word is traditionally understood, and in the face of the "seen that, got the tee-shirt, move along" attitude towards sharing others' lives - but for now, that is a digression.
What I am curious about now, and what I see as offering significant potential to the risk and insurance industries, is a process I am seeing mentioned more and more often; 'gamification' - the use of game design techniques to engage audiences. This post (by Confused of Calcutta) is a good discussion of the topic. This TED video is good too.
Change is the biggest gamification example of them all - "a new game every week" - and Wikipedia lists the following further gamification examples:
Back to the Confused of Calcutta link above, and where this all hopefully starts to make sense when it concerns risk, JP suggests something along the lines of: gamification used on its own is like "putting lipstick on a pig"...
- achievement "badges"
- achievement levels
- "leader boards"
- a progress bar or other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task a company is trying to encourage, such as completing a social networking profile or earning a frequent shopper loyalty award.
- systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points
- challenges between users
- embedding small casual games within other activities.
He is talking about the fact that, if an underlying subject or process is fundamentally dull, no amount of gaming layered on top is going to make the slightest difference. He is specifically talking about work - he now works for salesforce.com - and rather candidly suggesting, I think, that just sticking a salesforce platform under a dull business won't make it any less dull - but I am getting back to the medium and the message again and away from my point.
Gamification won't make the process of buying (or selling) insurance any more "fun" but it will be one of the tactics used to encourage people to share their knowledge about uncertainty - something I believe people are genuinely interested and concerned about, and which has nothing to do with insurance, right?
So, to the extent uncertainty about particular things (for example, activities {like driving}, events {a party for example} or processes {like banking}) is one core feature of the more general term "risk", I expect gamification will be a key element used to encourage people to start sharing knowledge about specific uncertainties. Such collaborative processes will begin to cause reductions in some specific uncertainties, and lead all of us to be able to start thinking differently about risk generally, and produce new ideas for dealing with it.
And risk, unlike insurance, is no pig.
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